The great failure of market economies is that they take no measure of externalities: if something doesn’t have market value, it doesn’t exist; this is what economists call “the tragedy of the commons”. The emergence and development of the environmental movement pioneered the understanding of how markets, in a bid to drive down costs, “externalize” them – or, to put it more crudely, get someone else (usually the taxpayer) to pay for them; for example, polluting a river is cheaper than processing the waste product and recyling it. In just the same way, markets externalize the social costs of their ways of working; it is left to individuals – and their overworked NHS doctors – to deal with the exhaustion, work-related depression, stress and the care deficit.
extract of Willing Slaves - How the overwork culture is ruling our lives, by Madeleine Bunting